Grayson Currin, writing for Pitchfork in February: “Composed of tender torch songs, elegiac drifters, and soulful melodies, Blake’s first puts him in the rare company of fellow singers — Thom Yorke, Karin Dreijer, Antony Hegarty, Justin Vernon, Dan Bejar — who’ve recently bent their own lavish voices, not samples, to make interesting pop music shaped with electronics. These songs are bigger than the defense of any microgenre, and, chances are, they’ll soon make Blake a star. He deserves it.”

The microgenre in question is dubstep, another impossible-to-define electronic-music variant, heavy on glitchy clicks and pops, jittery tempos and plenty of deeeeep basssssss. It first emerged a decade ago, initially morphing out of harder/faster 2-step and grime movements yet owing as much to polar-opposite twin towers of rhythm that rose out of the U.K. a bit before that. At the seductive, menacing and meditative end of ’90s electronica: beyond-blunted grooves from Bristol, home to Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky. From the other extreme: heart-racing, mind-boggling blasts of drum and bass.

On either side of the Atlantic, however, then or now, no one outside of dance-music aficionados and Urb readers could likely name you anyone associated with dubstep, much less explain what said music is supposed to sound like. The reason lots of people who gleefully don’t know squat about electro can nonetheless tell you something about James Blake, on the other hand, is proof of two things: 1) Currin’s prediction is coming true; and 2) Blake has rapidly transcended dubstep, or any genre for that matter.

He’s currently having it both ways: he carries the cachet of dubstep cool yet appeals to borderline-pop people who couldn’t care less about that. The soon-to-be 23-year-old Londoner succeeds where others remain only intriguing because at heart Blake is a blue-eyed soul singer, one with an arresting (if also familiar) voice.

It’s a natural that he recently collaborated with Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, an artist of a similar less-is-more aesthetic. Their new track “Fall Creek Boys Choir” comes from another in an impressive string of EPs – this one, Blake’s seventh, is called Enough Thunder, due Oct. 10 – that have been prolifically pouring out of this upstart the past two years. That’s in addition, by the way, to a full-length self-titled debut comprised of completely different material, including a magnetic remodeling of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love.” (God bless PJ Harvey, but James Blake deserved the Mercury Music Prize this year more than Let England Shake.)

Blake and Vernon seem like spirit cousins. Compared to Antony Hegarty, whose voice Blake’s most eerily resembles, he seems like a long-lost twin. “Antony and the Johnsons style” said the know-it-all to my right, with Jeff Spicoli flair, moments into Sunday night’s set at the Music Box, the first of two packed shows at the Hollywood venue to start this week. That dude was being the worst sort of hipster, but he has a point: when Blake is at his most musically naked, it’s hard not to hear Antony’s angelic quaver coursing through his every yelping syllable. (Granted, his approach is noticeably more influenced by Prince at his moodiest.)

He’s mighty adventurous, and thus far Blake has been unpredictable when it comes to how sonic washes (or lack thereof) frame his mantra melodies. “I Never Learnt to Share,” for instance, a speaker-panning looped marvel in concert — the entrancing recording of which doesn’t do it justice — finds Blake ruminatively repeating: “My brother and my sister / They don’t talk to me / But I don’t blame them / But I don’t blame them.” Out of that, he layers and layers and layers, the tone growing rueful, then resigned, then finally at peace with it.

But songs like “Give Me My Month” or the new “Once We All Agree” (also from the forthcoming Enough Thunder EP), riveting moments Sunday night that relied less on loops, found Blake abating the skull-rattling swells of sonorous bass and sustained keyboards, and instead playing alone at digital piano. They weren’t just breathers, however, although the crowd needed them now and then, it seemed, as did Blake’s sidemen, startlingly idiosyncratic drummer Ben Assiter and effects guitarist Rob McAndrews.

It’s while drifting inside those pieces, so transfixing at the Music Box, that you can really notice the purity of James Blake’s approach. I don’t mean just his unusual voice, which sounds as much like a new-romantic put-on as it does a heartfelt cry. He weeps without tears when he sings, but ultimately that’s just one more trick in his twitchy schematic. His aim, it seems, is to discover futurism by deconstructing the past until only enticing remnants remain.

Personally, the wistful beauty of his music takes me back as much as it hurtles me forward. Back to the Blue Nile, to post-Avalon Bryan Ferry, to late-era Talk Talk and early-era Alison Moyet, to the robotic allure of Laurie Anderson. Yet in all cases the sensation is strictly fleeting, a whiff detected amid weird, off-kilter rhythms that float along as if without any determinable meter or tempo. They seem to just surge and pull back at will, instinctively – until you watch Blake and his players more closely, and realize that within even the most cyclonic passages, they’re locked into a syncopated beat. You just can’t feel it very easily yourself without looking directly at them.

The blending of the two, Blake’s soulful coming-of-age ache and the skittish fantasia in which he wraps it, is an act of ambitious imagination that succeeds; James Blake may be the most challenging yet rewarding album experience you’ll find this year. But I wasn’t prepared for how much more it could come to life on stage, even given such a relatively staid atmosphere. (Yes, there was something of a light show, but it, too, was minimalist; this ain’t Deadmau5.)

Beyond the fascination of how they’re keeping time among themselves – and how it is that Blake makes himself sound like he’s in a duet with Sia during “To Care (Like You)” – there’s nothing much to watch here. What mesmerizes is the array of tones, as earthly as they are otherworldly, that Blake and his mates splash across skeletal grooves, while heavy waves of bass accompanying cinematic climaxes leave your hair standing on end from the strength of the sound waves. Like innovators before him, from Eno to the xx, Blake is about finding meaning within mood, satori in silent spaces.

Strangely amazing, then, that people who couldn’t tell dubstep from Daft Punk are catching on to it. Guess great voices will out, no matter how they come packaged.

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